Fighting For Liberation in the Face of Fascism
Fighting For Liberation in the Face of Fascism
They tried to bury us, but little did they know - we were seeds.
We are staring down the proverbial barrel after the US election. Holding that weapon -is the amorphous threat of fascism. Regardless of who won the presidential race, the empire would still continue. Our votes as radicals only being used to select our opponent, and to select the grounds to keep doing the work, to keep resisting, and to keep working towards liberation. However, now that we have come out of this election, we are faced with Donald Trump, the policies of Project 2025, and the real risk that we slide into a christo-fascist authoritarian regime.
No matter who is in political power, they will not dismantle the weapons of domination, violence, hierarchy, and oppression. They will not cede any ground, or loosen their grip on power and money. And so we have to stay resolute to continue our fight for a better future. The goals we have set are still there, but now the opponents are different. More organized, filled with hatred. And yet, we also have a hatred kindling in ourselves. Of the social and political systems that destroy humanity, that kill innocent people, that dim the lives that otherwise could be so bright, that control us, manipulate us, hate us, and kill us. Save that hatred in your hearts. Direct those feelings away from depression and redirect them towards righteous anger to change the very system. That anger turns into energy to resist. Not for the short term, but the long term. The despair we feel is what they want us to feel. The far-right wants us to be scared, want us to stay silent.
We won’t be silent. We won’t stop fighting for collective liberation. We won’t be subsumed into the mechanisms of power that threaten the existence of life, of nature, and humanity.
None of us have a definite plan on what exactly to do.
The Plan is to Create A Viable Alternative, and Fight
While no one has a definite blueprint for the future, and while many of us have ideas of possibilities on the horizon. We really don’t know what will work and what won’t work. Which is why we need to experiment and adapt. We need to not only look to the future but also to the past. We need to learn from our ancestral fights, battles, and losses. We need to understand how we got here, the methods and techniques our ancestors used, and adapt those techniques to our current circumstances. As the climate changes and collapses, we need to adapt not only our beliefs but our social and economic systems as well. These social and economic systems are deeply intertwined with the problems we are seeing and the problems we will face in the future.
Fascism is an easy answer to complex questions. It is a system that ignores nuance. One that exploits the minds of people into believing in a fake hierarchy, believing in a “strong man”, believing in simple answers to complex problems. Why do the work of understanding white privilege and the impact it’s had on generations of people when they can think they are above everyone else because they are white? Why learn the complex interplay that economics and immigration play together, the nuances of everyday life, and the immigrants that are at the center of American society and economics? When the easy answer that fascists give is to deport them all? It’s a quelling of intellectualism. A subservience to hierarchy and to others who will sweep away all of the problems, if they let them deport, jail, or kill groups of people. The mechanisms of fascism in the US are entwined with white supremacy, Christianity, and capitalism. All of these combine to create social and political systems of hierarchical value, of strict gender and social roles, of an “us” and a “them”, a group of the blessed, and a group of the damned.
The first wave of fascism in the 1930’s across Europe, is directly mirrored now. However, as before mainly economic issues were central to the swing towards fascist beliefs. Now, we have seen a transformation in our current day. While those on the right wing say they voted for Trump for the “economy” - it’s the cultural war that they have bought into. The constant chaos of this modern world has left an open gap for fascists to come in, giving young men a reason to embrace hierarchy, religion, and racism. The cultural war against BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people has raged on, we have become their scapegoats. The same propaganda is reused from the 1930s and changed (in the case of groups like Q Anon). The same tactics used by fascists in the past is rearing it’s head again, had has been for a long time.
We can see the parallels of the past to the present. We can see the connections of what happened, to what is happening now. We have to learn from previous battles with fascism, and most importantly, adapt their techniques of resistance to the modern day, and to the modern versions of fascism.
It’s not enough to look to the past, but we have to look toward the future. And think of the world we want to see, and make it a reality. A total dismantling of the current system may lead to collapse, but as we have seen in the past, capitalism, hierarchy, homophobia, racism, and sexism will still hold on unless the new systems are so impervious to their influence that they can’t latch on again.
I will list some personal ideas of what a viable future toward liberation might look like, given our current circumstances and environment.
They can burn humanity and the planet, but like a phoenix, we will rise.
There have been countless videos and text posts online after the election, wondering what to do. Most people are resolute in falling into nihilism and resolving themselves to just let things happen.
Others are using their anger to fuel real, meaningful, action. Fascists will not wait around for us to fight back to carry out their sick plans. And we as leftists can’t sit back and let them continue any further. We have to fight back in whatever ways we can. Fight to survive while also thriving. Fight the collapse while also building our alternatives, while building a better future.
Wildfires may destroy the landscape, but in nature, this destruction can make the seeds that live by fire start to grow. We are seeds. We have been deposited by our ancestors over generations of struggle, the fires of fascism have arrived, threatening to burn everything away. And no matter what we will bloom.
In our fight, we will be planting the seeds for the radically different system we envision. In our actions of resistance, we also need to water the grounds for persistence.
Resistance to Persistence
The mechanisms of power that capitalism uses for control, are central to our everyday lives. We work for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic necessities. The feudal lords control the land, decide who can do what with it, control the flow of commodities and labor, and in turn control who gets access to the basics of life. As quoted from my article on building encrypted communication networks:
We need to take back control of what it means to live by collectivizing, decommodifying, and changing every system we interact with in our lives. Building mass political movements is easier when we address core parts of our lives and use our social and political frameworks to influence them. Building a mass political movement is easier when people don’t have to worry about their food, if they can afford their water bill, if they can afford to keep the lights on, etc. All of this is the carrot being dangled in front of the proverbial horse. You are promised a great life if you create profit for someone else. Take the carrot away, and take it back.
What I mean is that decommodifying access to resources takes the power away from corporations and states to control us. Being ungovernable means building autonomy, taking back the commons, and making sure all people have access to what they need.
I would suggest reading that full section in the link above so you can see my thought process on how creating autonomous infrastructure can aid in building mass movements and mass change.
Our resistance to the rise of fascism will be the seeds for our persistence in the future.
So far we don’t know how Trump’s plans will play out in the end, and this is speculation about the near future. But some of the policies already being talked about can give us hints at what they plan to do. And give us hints on planning what we need to do.
Rising Inflation and Food Costs | Building Food Autonomy
With the looming threat of insanely high tariffs on imports from specific countries, we can expect inflation to get worse. Corporations will take the suffering of middle-class people, and ring as much profit as they can from it. It will become harder for the average person to survive. With the flood of inflation, we need to actively build food autonomy across all regions. The grocery store might be too expensive, but we can make strides to get people to grow their food, and supplement their diets with things they grow. We can radically change our urban and suburban environments to be more conducive to survival, and replace lawns with gardens and small farms, while revitalizing the communities around us.
Gutting the Department of Education | Creating Free Schools
The Department of Education is under threat, cutting access to things like access to college, school accountability, and school funding/subsidies for low-income and rural areas. We could see schools close down, and for some children, free school meals are the only food they have access to.
Right-wing religious thought will also destroy legitimate topics of education such as an accurate portrayal of history, not teaching core scientific ideas like evolution, and teaching abstinence instead of sexual education.
Education as a whole will be under threat. And an uneducated populace is exactly what fascists want.
So we will need to look to the past and look towards the present day and the future. The Black Panther Party had many survival programs, one of the most influential and impactful was the free breakfast program.
We could work to create free schools, that focus on providing an education to people to supplement schooling that is taken over by religious and right-wing ideology, or in the worst cases, provide education to people if public schools entirely fail. With the technological tools we have on hand. It’s possible to create an entire library of banned books, solid peer-reviewed and factual text books, and history books that can be run on a single computer. (See the article below)
Changes to HUD | Expropriating Land, Ecovillages, and Dual Power
There are talks of getting rid of discrimination protections for marginalized communities when it comes to getting access to housing. To resist these inequities, we have to build our own equitable systems outside of their power dynamics. We need to make free and collective housing. This can be done while strengthening our resilience to climate collapse.
Mass Deportations | Mass Revolutionary Resistance
The fascists that are coming into power want to deport millions of people from the US. This is the combination of all the forces that we have stood up against, the rising militarization of police forces, the growing power of ICE, the cop cities being built, and the private prison systems, all coalesce into this plan.
We have to do whatever we can to stop deportations. Direct action will be necessary. It’s not enough to protest, we have to stand between the families that will be ripped apart and the police/ICE. Safehouses can be established to hide those at risk of deportation. We have to do whatever we can to sabotage the raids, the transportation of innocent people, and do whatever we can to sabotage the concentration camps that will “detain” people.
We need to protect those who need to be protected.
The power in us joining together, protecting families from deportation, and protecting people from fascist violence will snowball to create an even larger movement of resistance.
Dual power to build mass movements
Rising Inflation | The Return to Convivial and Low-Tech Methods
The poor and middle class will be locked out of acquiring basic needs through the use of economic warfare through the use of tariffs. We will see the price of consumer goods, some that are necessary to living, skyrocket in price. Further ensuring that poor and working-class people cannot afford to live. Locking them into additional debt, and with the end goal of producing a class of people dispossessed from the land, their homes, and ending up houseless. With the criminalization of houselessness being enacted and further planned, combined with the 13th Amendment, will create large groups of people at risk of being arrested and converted from serfs to slave labor. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. The massive inflation will be used as a tool to lock poor and working-class people into losing their livelihoods and possibly being arrested for not having housing.
We can turn to convivial and low tech solutions to meet the needs of all people. Using and reusing resources that already exist or are easy to manufacture at a local level, we can give people the tools to live their lives, while cutting down on their need for capital to survive.
While basic services like electricity may skyrocket in price, we can help each other generate our own electricity, divesting from the system and producing autonomy.
We can focus on low-tech solutions to daily life. Using natural materials combined with the waste of the capitalist system, we can reusing existing technology that normally would end up in e-waste facilities or landfills, using the ‘trash’ of capitalism to create libraries, mobile schools, media servers, localized social media platforms, washing machines, power generation. The list is long.
Check out https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/low-tech-solutions/ for more ideas on this.
The Fight Hasn’t Changed, The Goals are Still the Same, We Will Resist and Win.
Short of writing an entire book, I wanted to link some things together to point out that the fight hasn’t changed. We are in a fight against capitalism, exploitation, violence, domination - and against the fascist ideology and regime that wants to do harm. Our resistance can be just that, temporary resistance. Or our resistance can be the seeds for a better future. The battles and methods we will need to use to fight fascism will be the building grounds for larger change. The fight to survive this evil and to survive on a dying planet will be the building grounds for us building an equitable system, and helping to regenerate the earth.
Our resistance is interconnected, and we need to treat it as a seed for the future.